di Giulia Sarno

Nella primavera del 2012, Allen Ravenstine e Robert Wheeler si sono trovati nel Grant Avenue Studio di Hamilton (Ontario) per apparire in un documentario sul ruolo dei sintetizzatori modulari nella musica elettronica, diretto da Robert Fantinatto (I Dream of Wires). L’argomento principale dell’intervista è la scelta del sintetizzatore ElectroComp EML come strumento live nella compagine dei Pere Ubu, in cui Ravenstine ha militato dal 1975 al 1989, e Wheeler dal 1994 ad oggi.

Ma l’occasione dell’intervista si trasforma presto in qualcosa di diverso.

Allen and I had gone to Toronto to be filmed for a movie called I Dream of Wires – ci ha raccontato Wheeler quando lo abbiamo incontrato – and while we were there, oh! we just happend to have a studio that got these seven EMLs, proptypes, 500s (which I had never seen), all the pieces. And they said “If you’d like to play, we’ve got a couple of hours”.

Niente di premeditato, dunque. Ravenstine, che si è lasciato alle spalle la sintesi ormai da molti anni, acconsente a patchare l’EML-200 dello studio e i due si mettono a suonare. Quello che ne viene fuori è descritto nelle note di pubblicazione come “a voyage of mutual discovery in a genre that they had pioneered a decade apart”.

We had never played before, it was the very first time that we ever played together. We did one day, and then we came back the next day for the filming, and when that was done we had a lot more time, so we kept going. So we recorded for two days. What was funny was that Allen and I thought that we were there for about 35, 40 minutes and it had been like two hours. We were just lost into it. The recording engineer said it was like one person or one mind with multiple arms. I was playing an EML-101 and he was playing an EML-200. It was just improvisation, and we got the two records from it.

Il risultato della lunga improvvisazione viene dunque sezionato e parzialmente pubblicato da Blue Jet Music in due vinili da 12” contenenti due tracce ciascuno, intitolati City Desk e Farm Report, disponibili in edizione limitata dall’11 febbraio del 2013. Più tardi lo stesso anno vedono la luce due album in cd con gli stessi titoli, con nove tracce ciascuno.

The names of the albums and tracks came after. They are mostly very old electrical terms, and our label is called Blue Jet, referring to the lightning bolt that comes off the top of the thunderhead up to the troposphere, instead of coming down to earth. The album titles instead come from the emails that we write to each other. When I write Allen, because I live in a farm, I would often call my emails “farm report”, because I would actually give him a little report on the farm activity, like “We just got the strawberries coming in, the beans are starting to come up, we baled the first hay…”, things like that, and then he started writing back as “city desk”, because he lives in Manhattan. So it’s basically the titles of our emails to each other.

Vi proponiamo l’ascolto delle tracce che aprono i due dischi, specularmente intitolate Sunrise in Milan (Milan è la località dove si trova la fattoria di Wheeler, già casa natale di Thomas Edison, di cui Wheeler è l’ultimo discendente) e A Morning Mood:

I dischi si possono acquistare sul sito ufficiale di Blue Jet Music, su quello dei Pere Ubu, su Discogs, su iTunes e su Amazon.

Allen Ravenstine con i Pere Ubu nel 1980:

Robert Wheeler con i Pere Ubu nel 1995: